


It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

by xziris



Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter RPF
Genre: FAHC, Gen, Immortal FAHC, Light hurt comfort I think, end of the world AU, just a couple of guys being dudes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-10
Updated: 2020-11-10
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:48:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27492985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xziris/pseuds/xziris
Summary: The world is crashing at their feet, but Michael and Gavin are used to that. Instead, they talk about why.(Gift for my beautiful friend Maggie who reads everything I post out loud to me)
Relationships: Gavin Free & Michael Jones
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11





	It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

Michael’s face was not illuminated by streetlights, but by the taller-than-skyscraper flames that licked up the streets down below. Sirens blared, and cars screeched, his skin began to tingle with heat. What a sorry, sorry sight he looked down upon. With an ironically painful joy, his heels hit against the side of Maze Bank as his legs began to kick slightly. Michael squinted hard to try and make out any discernible shape of a car, or a truck, but the only vehicle he saw was the helicopter he’d made note of about ten minutes ago.

Had they seen him, he would’ve been mistaken for something morbid. He doubted that they’d swoop over and save him, however, he was just Michael. Maybe if he was in his heist gear, or perhaps something more formal, there would be a rescue mission for the man on the roof. As he sat, with the ground beginning to shake dangerously at the foot of his perch, nobody would bother to grab him. The city was full of important moguls, politicians, celebrities. Everybody. Everybody had migrated here. It was some twisted, corrupted hotspot. That’s why he belonged.

He’d miss Los Santos. Not that the city itself was any good, it was a capitalist’s wet dream, but because there was a community. With a city as riddled with crime as this one, people aren’t that fazed when you need to shelter in their shop with a bullet wound and a broken bone or two. The bakers near Trevor’s penthouse even offered them extra donuts for protecting local businesses. Michael ran a hand down his face, pulling the skin under his eyes a little too far down, flinching at the mildly sharp pain. He shook his head, releasing a sigh, then shut his eyes to the burning around him.

Once he opened them again, there was a difference in how the light played with his shadows. Michael blinked to make sure his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him, but his resigned grimace he’d been wearing softened to a smile once he noticed how dim the fading was. It couldn’t have been natural light, not a flame growing angry behind him. There could only be one explanation.

“Should’ve known you’d find me,” Michael said without turning around, “sit with me, I’ve got a great view.”

Gavin didn’t say anything, not that he needed to, and joined Michael on the edge. They were close, a little too much so, but the contact was welcome. It was grounding. Without the brush of a glowing pink jacket, then the demeaning crack that clambered up the building across the street would’ve sent an equally devastating shiver down his spine. Michael was reassured to have him, to have someone with him for the end of the world.

“You know, I didn’t think it would end this soon,” Gavin said, “bit different from last time.”

Michael turned to face him, finally. The light hit his face in an unflattering way, he looked older than he’d ever seen him. Not wiser, though, but that usually hit him in a few more years - if ever. Michael had only seen him hit forty about six or seven times, somehow one of their millions of wrong actions usually caused armageddon before then. Which was, probably, why he was more bored than scared. Why Gavin didn’t shake beside him, why their skin remained still.

“I didn’t think so either, dude. Any idea what did it?”

“Hm,” Gavin started but didn’t finish. His thoughts filled the air, tangible but invisible. Michael wished he could grab one of his internal monologues to understand how he worked. They had been through thousands of lifetimes together, but he still knew little to nothing about the complex working he called a brain. Maybe in their next life, they could be surgeons to finally learn. Learn what makes them up, why they were different, and why Gavin was so, well, Gavin-y.

Gavin. It was funny how they’d found each other, it was Michael’s fourth life and Gavin’s second. Coincidentally enough, before then, the apocalypse had never hit. The second they began to seek out the other, that was when the world ended in a multitude of plagues. Perhaps it wasn’t worth it, maybe there was a correlation. But those were ideas that Michael didn’t want to explore, this was what they’d always done. Still, Michael considered as Gavin’s eyes flared up with a familiar lick of light, maybe he should force himself to explore it.

“You know, I’ll miss this one,”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t think I will,” Gavin said, “it kinda hurts to say, and I’m sure I will eventually, but this wasn’t the best life for me. The amount of times I nearly died.”

“So is organised crime still a no-no?”

“Yes! Every time we try it, it never ends well!”

Michael laughed and said, “I’ll miss the people though.”

Gavin shut his mouth, his jaw locked. As if he forgot about their crew, his shoulders hunched in a dismissal of the topic. Michael turned away from him again, letting his partner ponder on the people they’d loved. The warm hands of a worried crewmate, the harsh words of those betrayed, the loving laughs during tipsy nights. Dusk on the balcony with a rotating gang of them, alcohol in hand, singing mid 00’s pop songs. Of course, there were the worse nights, but they stayed the constant source of security.

There was a scientific term for the part of the experiment you’d keep the same, some sort of variable, that Michael learnt a few lifetimes ago. He consequently forgot about it. Gavin probably remembered. He could probably ask him, if he didn’t assume his face was pulled into a sour lemon deliberation about their life. Michael drew out a blink once again only to see the building across the street was descending into rubble. That could’ve been avoided if they’d just done something right.

No, Michael groaned quietly, he shouldn’t be thinking about that. It happened, it’s done, he couldn’t have stopped it. Unless... Gavin shifted slightly beside him. They were thinking the same thing now, then. They often do. When you spend centuries with the same person, your psyches tend to meld into one bank of the same thoughts. If he could pick up a unique one it would all but be fleeting. There weren’t many positives to individual ideology when you’re a team.

“We could find them again,” Gavin said but he must have seen Michael’s face so followed up with a, “or not.”

“It’s not that I don’t wanna find them, I just don’t want to lose them again and again.”

“I wish we could take them with us. Do you think if we bit them they’d-“

“We’re immortal, Gavin, not vampires.”

There’s that word. Michael doesn’t like it, personally, because it wasn’t really what they were. He didn’t even know what they were, as nobody else had discovered their ‘abilities’. There were a few answers that they’d explored. It could be that they had just hopped through alternate dimensions. This was likely as time always picked up where they left off, but didn’t explain why they still saw photos of their old selves in the background of newspapers and the like.

Then again, their time looping power could be for them alone. This didn’t make much sense as they looped together, and there wasn’t a lag for either of them, he didn’t think. Plus, there must be more like them, they couldn’t be the only ones. Or maybe they were and this was all just some sick, twisted psychological experiment on both of them. With the way the government operates, it wouldn’t surprise him. But existential crisis aside, there was no evidence to really back up this claim.

The amount of times their crew had tried to wring out the corruption in that system, the one that depended on it the most. Each and every one of them fought for a fair future to give to the people around them, their trials never slept.

“We haven’t had anyone we like as much to try, though. Nobody’s really made us want to find them.”

“I mean,” Michael said, “you made me wanna find you.”

As he said it, the helicopter began to plummet. Neither of them had been paying it much attention, so the perfect timing of Michael’s word and it’s crash twisted something in his throat. They turned their heads to meet each other’s faces. Gavin’s eyes explored every pore on Michael before sighing, looking away, and focusing on a bright spot far off over the hills of Los Santos.

Had they really taken this many times to figure it out? Probably not. It just now snuck up on them with a cold blade. All their wrong actions in the past... how did the universe decide they were wrong? It was something they pulled out of thin air to feel better about linking arms at the sight of collapse. These were things Michael shouldn’t have thought about, as now Gavin had caught on, and their silence were acid scars forming on the inside of his cheeks.

“So, what did you actually think it was?”

“What, what did we do this time?”

“Yeah.”

“Probably hire Matt,” Michael said, forcing his words over the ‘what we always do’ that lodged in his throat. Gavin didn’t pay much mind to it, humming in acknowledgement to what he said. Neither of them laughed at the joke. Good, Michael thought, it wasn’t a good one to begin with. They liked Matt.

“Maybe it was the holding hostages at gunpoint thing.”

“Maybe. Or perhaps the stealing random cars in the street thing.”

“It could be that one time, right, where we robbed a bank, and you kept laughing so much you bloody shot Alfredo in the foot because your trigger finger slipped.”

“Specific,” Michael said with a nod, “but I wouldn’t put it past the grand lord of fate. Or whatever.”

“I mean, do you honestly think...”

“You know I don’t want it to be.”

“Would you... if it was because of... y’know... would you stop finding me, boy?”

Michael’s lips buttoned. Again, with out a lick of coincidence, a mother screaming for her child rang out over the collective pollution of decay. She was overtaken with a replacement helicopter swooping in from the east, one that would ignore her for the fifty year old man who donated half his money to a charity fund so that his name was no longer associated with his long list of offences. The worst part about that sentence was that Michael could’ve chosen over a hundred men to pin the description to.

He was avoiding the question. Just like the two of them had avoided the subject despite talking around it. They’d danced over the words, crumpled up the sentences like paper and tossed them into the recycling. Because he didn’t want to say yes. It was the expected answer, really, and the one that he knew he would give to anyone else.

Yes, he’d leave Gavin and save the world without having to do anything. Yes, he’d go and he’d finally settle down knowing he could start a family and raise children safely without the imminent threat of the apocalypse. He would be able to live like anybody else, like he wanted, and be happy. Comfortable, and safe. Michael would be able to ignore the inevitable reset if he surrounded himself with loved ones.

Michael could easily forget about Gavin if everyone around him got to live. It was a logical, easy answer. But the tip of his tongue and the bottom of his heart argued with the parts of his brain that made that answer appear so clearly straight away. It was the right thing to do. A noble act, a sacrifice, etcetera, etcetera. It was just Gavin. He was just Michael. They could survive without each other. For the greater good, Michael almost said ‘yes’.

“No,” Michael said instead. He meant it.

He meant it with all his heart. Because...

It was the nights they snuck out of their university dorm room to drink cheap beer and laugh at dumb jokes they’d told each other decades ago.

It was the detentions they earned after cheating off of each other during Spanish vocabulary quizzes and still getting no correct answers.

It was the feeling of waking up one lifetime and knowing that it was the day he’d find the person he was looking for all that current life.

It was the shoulder to cry on as the inevitable demise of their world came too early with the ones they loved begging to know why they weren’t scared.

It was the comfort of having him so close and knowing that the end of the world meant nothing when they would wake up together the next life on.

Because, really, it was Gavin. He shared the experience, he shared their time, and he was always going to be there. He was a man who made the term ‘best friends’ look oversimplified, worn out, and dull. They were Gavin and Michael, and they stuck together. He had his loved one right there, his family, the one person who could stare at him covered head to toe in blood and gore just to smile as though he was a schoolboy getting into a bit of trouble with his English teacher. 

“No,” Michael repeated as a crack in the building they sat upon started to form, “no, I don’t think I’d ever stop looking for you. There’s no one I’d rather cause this level of destruction with, boy.”

Gavin’s grin was wider than he’d seen it in lifetimes when he said, “so, you willing to risk it all again?”

“Of course I am. Wanna go round one more time with me, Gav?”

“That shouldn’t even be a question, Michael.”

**Author's Note:**

> First FAHC fic babey! Hope you enjoyed!


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